Saturday, May 13, 2017

I awoke this morning startled. My
mind was thinking of a former student preparing to go to the mission field. I
thought to myself, it’s good that he doesn’t need to translate the Scriptures
before he gets there. He can build on the work of those that have gone before
him. Evangelical missionaries have been translating the Scriptures since the
eight translations made by William Carey in India at the beginning of the Great
Century of Protestant Missions.

But then I thought about the Scriptures
that are now available. Who controls the armament? And this woke me up with a
start. Have Evangelicals turned over control of the armament to those who
would dull the blade? To better understand the context of this question that
woke me up with a start, a brief explanation is needed.

The Bible of the Protestant Reformation

Possibly or likely the greatest
gift given by Martin Luther to the Protestant Reformation was a return to the text
and authority of Holy Scriptures. The reader may ask, “What was the authority
in the Western State Church prior to the Protestant Reformation?” It was:

Scripture + Tradition, or in actuality,

Tradition + Scripture.

Before the Protestant
Reformation the Scriptures available to church leaders was only the Latin
Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate, dated back to when Damasus, Bishop of Rome, commissioned
Jerome to compile an authorized translation of the Bible into Latin in A.D.
383. An example of the doctrinal bias in this translation was his use of the verb
“to do” + the noun “penance” to translate the Greek verb “to repent.” The blade
of the New Testament was intentionally dulled for doctrinal or catechetical
purposes.

The translation of this verb and
many others were rectified by the Reformation Bibles translated directly from
the Greek. Hence, Tyndale’s translated the verb μετανοέω differently to what was
found in the Latin Vulgate:

Matthew 3:2 (Douai-Rheims), “And saying: Do
penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Matthew 3:3 (Tyndale), “saynge; Repet the
kyngdome of heue is at honde.”

Matthew 4:17 (Douai-Rheims), “From that time
Jesus began to preach, and to say: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.”

Matthew 4:17 (Tyndale), “From that tyme Iesus
begane to preache and to saye: repet for ye kigdome of heven is at honed”

The 1899 Douai-Rheims was faithfully
translated from the text of the Latin Vulgate. It has 69 uses of the word
“penance” often with various forms of the verb “to do,” such as “did penance,” “do
penance,” “had/have done penance,” etc.

For almost a thousand years the
Western church was required to use only the Latin Vulgate in its readings in
church, in its studies in schools, and in its development of Christian doctrine.
The blade had been dulled. The clarity of “repentance” (for example) had been
replaced with the need for the act of “doing penance”— entering the
Confessional Booth is the beginning of the Sacrament of Penance to receive
absolution from a sin and receive the required penance to complete atonement
for that sin.

Fortunately, Luther and his
Protestant contemporaries returned the Word of God to its original sharpness on
the issue of repentance. The greatest gift of the Protestant Reformation was a
sharpened Bible, honed through direct translation from the Greek and Hebrew, as
well as loosed from the confusion of the apocryphal books. Since the Protestant
Reformation Four Centuries of Protestant scholars have found their highest authority
in the words of Bible’s translated from the Greek and Hebrew texts.

Enter 19th Century Secular
Biblical Scholarship

In the late 19th
Century the flames of secularism were fanned in academic circles. These flames burned
in every area of theological studies. Two of the most crucial areas impacted,
as far as biblical scholarship, were (1) approaching the Bible as a mere human book
and (2) the question of original language texts.

In considering the Bible to be
human, like Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
House of the Seven Gables, biblical scholars raised their own intellectual
abilities above those of the divine author. They reveled in their intellectual
abilities to deconstruct the Bible and exhume its mythical elements. These
scholars chipped away at the authority of the Bible from the inside out.

Meanwhile a more subtle
secularism took hold of biblical scholarship. This renewed field of study
deconstructed the original language text of the Bible. Conveniently ignoring
that there was a culture of people who always spoke Greek and who had a Church
more ancient in succession than was found in any Western Church region, Western
Church scholars and their Protestant counterparts became viral to reconstruct a
better original language text.

I once asked a New Testament
scholar why Erasmus did not leave Bale and travel to Greece to find a full
Greek text of the Book of Revelation. Apparently, Erasmus back-translated the Latin
text into Greek to fill in gaps when he had no Greek text available to him.
The New Testament scholar had no answer for me. Sure, the trip from Basel,
Switzerland, to Athens, Greece, is 1,500 miles on today’s roads. But would not that
trip be worth it to avoid back-translating from Latin into Greek, especially when
establishing a new paradigm for the original language text? Textual criticism
chips away at authority from the outside in.

These two fingers of secularism
simmered within mainstream Protestant academic circles for about 100 years. Then
they finally filtered down into Evangelical academia. It was English-language
Evangelicalism that largely controlled (1) the worldwide Bible Society movement and (2) the 19th
Century world missionary efforts.

Control of the Armament

The Bible societies had
prospered on getting Bible’s into the hands of the common folk through Bible
distribution and supporting missionaries who translated the Bible into the
languages of the people where they ministered. In the early 20th
Century a new kind of missionary emerged. These new ministers were the Wycliffe
Bible Translators. They were energized by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
This was a new brand of Bible translators, founded by Cameron Townsend in 1942.
They were non-denominational and non-theological. Their translators were
“educators” not “missionaries.” They approached Bible translation from a secular linguistic approach, and intentionally avoided doctrinal controversies—if
that were possible when translating the Bible.

One of the graduates of the
Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Chicago was Eugene Nida.
He would end up of playing a significant role in Bible translation on multiple
fronts. Nida, an ordained Northern Baptist, joined the American Bible Society
in 1943 and became its Executive Secretary for Translations in 1946, a post
that he retained for 35 years.

In May 1946 Nida attended the meeting
in Elfinsward, England, when the United Bible Society was formed by joint
agreement of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the American Bible Society,
the National Bible Society of Scotland, and the Netherlands Bible Society.

In November 1964 was perhaps the
most important meetings of Nida. It included Olivier Béguin of the United Bible
Society and Augustin Cardinal Bea of Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and
met at Crêt-Bérard, Lausanne, Switzerland. It was at this meeting that Nida
sketched out the preliminary form of what became the 1968 “Guiding Principles
for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible.”

Briefly, these principles guided
the United Bible Society’s efforts from 1968 to 1987, deeding oversight of all
their original language texts and all their translations as follows:

“C. ORGANIZATIONAL
STRUCTURE

For the most adequate development of a
translation program, there is need for three groups: 1. a Working Committee, 2.
a Review Committee, and 3. a Consultative Group.

1. Working Committee

Consisting of 4 to 6 persons equally
divided between Protestant and Roman Catholic constituencies and possessing
four essential characteristics:

The 1968 “Guiding Principles”
were revised in 1987 as “Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in
Translating the Bible the New Revised Edition Rome.” The same section as above
was revised to read:

"2.3. ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

For the most adequate development of a
translation program, there is need for three groups: 1. a translation team, 2.
a review panel, and 3. a consultative group.

2.3.1. Translation team

Consisting of not more than six persons of
high competence from the Roman Catholic and other Christian constituencies and
possessing four essential characteristics:

The reader will note the changes
in the composition of the Translation Teams according to this document. This
author will allow the reader to discern who may now control the weapons cache
held by the United Bible Society since 1987.

It may be no surprise that many
of the most important “readings” in the UBS Greek text now correspond to those
of the Latin Vulgate.

Sharpening the Sword

It almost sounds sacrilegious
from an Evangelical point-of-view to consider the need for sharpening the sword
of the Word of God. Is not the inherent sharpness of God’s sword self-evident?
According to Hebrews 4:12-13 the sword of the Word of God is sharper than any
double-edged sword. It cuts to the bone and marrow. It judges the thoughts and
intentions of the heart:

“For the word of God is living and powerful, and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and
spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all
things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”
Hebrews 4:12-13.

And yet, although this Word is
quick and lively, whether it be the Thomas Jefferson Bible, the Jehovah’s
Witness “New World Translation,” or the Douai-Rheims Bible, there are Bibles
that have been intentionally dulled. And whereas we in the English-speaking
world are insulated from the battles of Bible translation in the many languages
of the world, we would do well to be aware of what is happening in these many
languages and cultures.

So, this morning, as I woke up
with a startle, thinking of my former student going out as a missionary, my
prayer for him is—that he would be “Wise as a serpent and gentle as dove”
(Matthew 10:16). May the Lord lead him to use the best Bible available to
reach the hearts of those to whom he will be sent!